Donald Trump Responds to Jack Smith’s New Court Filing

Former President Donald Trump responded Wednesday afternoon after U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan made public a lengthy filing from special counsel Jack Smith in his investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to interfere with the transfer of power following the 2020 election.
Smith’s brief, filed last week but made public on Wednesday, aims to convince Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal election subversion case, that Trump’s alleged offenses are private rather than official acts and can, therefore, remain in the indictment.
“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith’s brief read. “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has pleaded not guilty to all charges and claimed the case is politically motivated against him.
Trump continued those claims Wednesday afternoon when he responded to the new filing on Truth Social. He also seemed to allege that the release coincided with Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate between his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, and Democrat Tim Walz.
“The release of this falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional, J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous Debate performance, and 33 days before the Most Important Election in the History of our Country, is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine and Weaponize American Democracy, and INTERFERE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” Trump posted.
“Deranged Jack Smith, the hand picked Prosecutor of the Harris-Biden DOJ, and Washington, D.C. based Radical Left Democrats, are HELL BENT on continuing to Weaponize the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power. ‘TRUMP’ is dominating the Election cycle, leading in the Polls, and the Radical Democrats throughout the Deep State are totally ‘freaking out.’ This entire case is a Partisan, Unconstitutional, Witch Hunt, that should be dismissed, entirely, just like the Florida case was dismissed!”
In another post Wednesday on Truth Social, Trump said that “Democrats are Weaponizing the Justice Department against me because they know I am WINNING, and they are desperate to prop up their failing Candidate, Kamala Harris. The DOJ pushed out this latest ‘hit job’ today because JD Vance humiliated Tim Walz last night in the Debate. The DOJ has become nothing more than an extension of Joe’s, and now Kamala’s, Campaign. This is egregious PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT, and should not have been released right before the Election. The Democrat Party is turning America into a Third World Country that tries to censor, harass, and intimidate their Political Opponents. What they have done to our Justice System is one of the Great, All Time, Tragedies….”
Of note, Smith’s filing was made on September 26 and unsealed Wednesday by Chutkan, not the Department of Justice.
Newsweek has emailed the Biden administration and the Harris-Walz campaign for comment Wednesday night.
The former president faces four felony counts in the DOJ’s case against him in Washington, D.C., after he allegedly tried to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
On January 6, 2021, Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election win. The riot erupted following repeated claims from Trump that the election was stolen via widespread voter fraud, despite there being no evidence of this. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and claimed the case is politically motivated against him.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision that former presidents have immunity for official acts conducted while in office but not for unofficial acts, Smith updated Trump’s original indictment, and a grand jury reindicted the former president last month.
The superseding indictment removes some specific allegations against Trump. However, the former president is still charged with the same four counts from the original indictment filed in August 2023: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
Read the full 165-page filing, with redactions, here.
Smith’s brief said that Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, told him “he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in the election” and tried to convince Trump to accept his 2020 election loss.
Trump, however, “disregarded” Pence “in the same way he disregarded dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his and his allies’ legal claims, and that he disregarded officials in the targeted states—including those in his own party—who stated publicly that he had lost and that his specific fraud allegations were false,” the brief read.
While a comprehensive congressional investigation spanning months and the indictment document have vividly outlined Trump’s attempts to reverse the election results, the filing introduces new narratives provided by Trump’s most trusted aides. These accounts depict an image of a president growing “increasingly desperate” and resorting to “deceit to target every stage of the electoral process,” all while his hold on presidency was diminishing.
“So what?” the filing quotes Trump as telling an aide after being alerted that Pence was in potential danger on Jan. 6, 2021.
The filing also states that Trump said, “The details don’t matter,” when told by an adviser that a lawyer mounting his legal challenges wouldn’t be able to prove the false allegations in court.
Update 10/2/24, 7:37 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.